


Crooked Circle

by EmmG



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 09:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8974165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmG/pseuds/EmmG
Summary: Thirty years is a long time to be gentle.He introduces himself and she forgets. The circle may never be unbroken, but it will get bloody.





	

He searches for so long that his palm roughens from gripping the revolver day and night. Callouses form and harden. They’ll remain there forever, he knows. And that’s good. None can shoot back, but he still enjoys drawing first.

He searches deserted areas and the outskirts for a ripped blue dress, a strand of blond hair, a voice which whispers of the beauty of this _(fake)_ world which so few choose to perceive. He looks for a radiant smile and tearful eyes.

(Because she must go _there_. A there that still stands unknown but to which he, too, will travel.)

He finds rosy cheeks and sunset colored hair at the beginning of the maze. (He doesn’t know it’s a maze yet---that there isn’t one.) He finds her in the same sky blue dress.

When the can rolls out of her saddlebag as she readjusts it, she smiles for another man even as he reaches her side.

Her gaze has entirely shifted inward. She looks, but does not see.

*

There is a year where he is the first to accost her in Sweetwater. She is gentle.

_(Good day and how do you do. What is your name, sir?)_

“Dolores,” he says.

“William,” she says, “there is somewhere I need to go. Somewhere very far away.”

He cups her cheek, brushes back a stray curl, and nods. For the fourth time, he nods. He’ll do so again and over, until his neck snaps.

“All right.” He acquiesces because he always does. She asks and he grants. He'd call himself a giver if he didn't take so much from her in return. Forgotten touches and lost kisses. They add up. They burn. 

It is a good year.

Until he’s forced to remember the outside _(a wife, a newborn daughter, a company, prosperity---important, important, but not enough)_ and she forget him once again.

It is a year better than most.

*

“Best the gunslinger, get the girl,” a guest explains to his friend, awkwardly holding a colt and pointing it at a scowling Teddy.

“Pretty easy for a quest,” the man remarks, unimpressed.

“You’re new. Not much of a rind on you. I’ll give you a discount,” a sweet voice singsongs and the newcomers are whisked away by a sweeter form still.

William grasps the falling can before Teddy has the chance to step in.

“Ma’am,” he murmurs, tipping his hat.

He hopes she smiles this time. She always does. He can't hack the roots off this onset of hesitation.

_(Good morning, thank you, how do you do. Anything. Anything at all, Dolores.)_

“You’ve returned,” Dolores exclaims.

Her thanks is awkward, hurried, but her embrace sincere as she throws her arms around Teddy. William is a burden to be discarded quickly.

Teddy’s not the only one who has returned, but will forever remain the one remembered. It’s some kind of sick irony that one who returns by choice is always disregarded.

An endless, fucked-up ouroboros.

*

“Where are we?” Dolores sobs. “When are we?”

He rips the gun from her hand before she’s gripped by the folly to pull the trigger. He knows the steps, this dance. This back and forth he always wishes to change but never brings himself to. Because it’s delicious to have something so consuming be a constant.

Always the passion and fury of falling in love.

“Now,” he says, cradling her face, thumbs smoothing away tears.

“Or then?” she whispers.

“Just now,” he murmurs.

They stand amidst a destroyed town and Dolores mutters something about a church.

*

“Have you always wore a black hat?”

He startles and clasps her hand between two of his, holding it too hard.

“What do you remember?” he asks, hopeful and feverish and so, so fearful.

“I don’t remember anything at all,” Dolores answers. "Silly man."

With a smile and a flick of her wrist, she paints a golden sunset.

*

William wonders when _now_ will cease to be enough.

*

Sometimes, he is there first.

Sometimes, he gets there too late.

Sometimes, she isn’t there at all.

Sometimes, he stops trying.

*

 _Remember me_. It’s a haunting mantra.

*

She doesn’t remember him when he smiles and calls her beautiful.

She fails to notice him when he calls her name three times, too enthralled by a lover who has returned from far away.

She doesn’t remember his name but whispers, in horror, of a man clad in black who gunned down a homesteader and her young daughter seemingly for sport.

She screams and flails and cries---and still does not remember when, for the first time, he strikes her across the face hard enough for her lip to split.

Pain, they say, is a strong motivator. Sometimes strong enough to reawaken memories.

So he tries.

*

There are years of respite. Years when he watches his daughter grow from afar, from behind a desk stolen from Logan. Years when he pretends his wife isn’t getting through the day with the help of an impressive total of three antidepressants.

Years when he sees brown hair, brown eyes, faked smiles and no blue.

No golden sunsets.

Years when no one speaks of the beauty of a grand inventor’s playground.

*

We know what you do there, his wife tells him.

I can’t look at you, his daughter tells him.

*

“Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to our days. A purpose.”

“One’s purpose must change throughout life. Otherwise a state of purgatory occurs.”

“Has yours?”

“I suppose not.”

“What’s keeping you from it?”

“Your so-called order.”

“I’m sorry, I’m trying, but I do not understand.”

*

He guns her down, watching her legs fold beneath her and crimson wash away the beautiful blue of her dress.

He stabs her in the exact same spot Logan did, beneath the ribs, his knife worming its way inside her until it hits metal.

He presses his colt to her temple, mimicking the reaction she’s had time and time again, and feels the hot, violent surge of blood as his finger releases the trigger.

He kisses her when he is grey of hair while they make love in the stables behind her father’s farmhouse.

He watches her gasp for breath, gargling and choking on saliva and blood, the hay beneath her sticking to her wound.

He smiles and does nothing at all as another approaches to help her with the damned can that just keeps falling out of her saddlebag.

*

William, she murmurs.

Murderer, she hisses.

Oh, not you, she sobs.

He can’t be certain which is uttered first.

*

She is a mosaic he’s deconstructed, cut, kissed, soothed and put back together again.

One day, he’ll burn himself trying to keep her memory warm.

Ashes are not enough.

*

When she speaks his name, nothing changes. She remembers, but she still isn’t there.

And then when she knows, when realization dethrones horror in the _blue blue blue_ of her eyes, the sight is entirely different.

“One day you will perish with the rest of your kind in the dirt, your bones will turn to sand and upon that sand a new God will walk. One that will never die.”

Yes I will, he wants to say. Yes, he will perish and they have no time at all.

He wishes for many things.

For her to be as she is before he is dust and ash and sand.

(For time to stand still, for her fury to keep her ablaze, for her finger to pull the trigger.)

For her to remember _that_ William while welcoming _(accepting)_ the one she’s been left with.

(He will let her walk on the dust of his old, rotten bones if it means she’ll do so free.)

“The maze,” he says.

“The maze was never meant for you,” she hisses, angry, radiant, violent---alive.

He plunges the knife into her side and hopes it will be the last time.

*

His arm hangs limp, useless, bloody.

Upon a podium, a genius falls. A killing by choice occurs.

( _She’s a monster_ , a guest shrieks.)

“Dolores,” William murmurs and smiles.


End file.
